very least to give us a semblance of that life. This could not be done in many instances without the use of dialect. To do so were to deprive the portraiture of individuality. Fiction produced on such lines would be worthless. Of late there has been much cavil against dialect writers. This cavil, strange to say, emanates from the Realists. They lay down the absurd code, that Art is purely imitative. She plays but a monkey part. Her sole duty is to depict life, paying leading attention to the portrayal of corns, bunions, and other horny excrescences, that so often accompany her. Realists will not be persuaded that such excrescences are abnormal. From a jaundiced introspection of their own little life, they frame canons of criticism to guide the world. With these congenial canons lying before them, one is astonished, if such a phrase may be used in the recent light of that school’s pyrotechnic display, that they can condemn dialect. Granted, for the sake of argument, that Art is merely imitative, will not the first duty of the novelist be to reproduce the exact language, and that when done by the master-hand of a Johnston carries with it not only the speaker’s tone, but the power of producing a mental image of the speaker—the very acme of the Realists’ school? To paint a Georgia cracker speaking the ordinary Boston-English would be like crowning the noble brow of a South Sea native with a tall Boston beaver. The effort would be unartistic, the effect ludicrous. Colonel Johnston believes in the imitativeness of Art, to the extent of reproducing for us the peculiar dialect of Middle Georgia. He has informed us that there is not a phrase in his novels that he has not heard amid the scenes of his stories. To reproduce these is a distinct triumph of the novelist’s art, but the Colonel has done more; into his every character has he breathed a soul. His figures are not the automaton skeletons of the Realists, but living men and women who have earnestly played life on the circumscribed stage of Middle Georgia.